VMware and EMC recently spun out several cloud computing and big data product teams to form a new, jointly owned subsidiary called "Pivotal." Today, Pivotal said it has begun operations and will deliver a set of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud products called Pivotal One, making it easier to build enterprise applications on a variety of cloud services.

Pivotal One will be sold "as a unified platform in Q4 2013," according to a Pivotal data sheet, but some of the products it includes are already available today. One of those is VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS software, which will soon be able to operate on both Amazon Web Services and VMware-based cloud networks.

"One of the things we're going to deliver this quarter is a version of Cloud Foundry showing this cloud-independent model where, at cloudfoundry.com, we'll be running on both an Amazon infrastructure as well as VMware's cloud infrastructure at the same time," Scott Yara, senior VP of Pivotal's platform and products, said on stage at a company announcement. Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz (and former VMware boss) also stressed the importance of working across different clouds, calling them the "modern equivalent of hardware."

Infrastructure-as-a-service clouds provide customers access to raw computing power in the form of virtual machines and storage. Platform-as-a-service abstracts much of the complexity away, making it easier to focus on just building applications. This convenience can come at the expensive of flexibility and the ability to port applications across different cloud services, but Pivotal claims its products will help businesses avoid being locked in to any one cloud platform.

Besides Amazon, Pivotal One will reportedly run on OpenStack and Windows Azure. Pivotal executives didn't go into a ton of detail today about how its products will work and how they will achieve the cross-platform dream many other vendors have promised, but Maritz fleshed out his views a few weeks ago in an interview given to CRN. Maritz talked about an "Amazon tax," saying "We don't want to make it so when you write an app in Amazon you are condemned to pay Amazon a tax for all eternity."

The CRN article continued:

One of the key ingredients to the new Pivotal offering is Cloud Foundry, the company's open-source cloud computing platform as a service that effectively virtualizes the cloud so "you can write your apps and not care about whether it is running on Amazon or [Microsoft] Azure or VMware or whatever," said Maritz.

Thus, Pivotal is aiming to deliver a platform as a service on top of a wide array of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, from Amazon's EC2 Web Service to Microsoft's Azure and other platforms too. "If infrastructure as a service is the new hardware, we are the new OS on top of it," said Maritz.

In reality, Pivotal won't deliver a single operating system, but rather a mix of hardware and software products (some of which may already be familiar to customers of EMC and VMware). Pivotal will also sell services and support to help businesses through the process of building applications.

Pivotal has 1,250 employees taken mostly from the former EMC and VMware business units. Besides Cloud Foundry, the Pivotal company includes former VMware product divisions such as Spring, its GemFire data management software division, and the Cetas big data analytics division. Pivotal also includes former EMC divisions such as Greenplum, which focuses on big data, and Pivotal Labs, which provides software development services and tools. Pivotal has also just taken in a $105 million investment from General Electric, which is now a part-owner of Pivotal along with EMC and VMware. (VMware itself is owned by EMC.)

Although VMware shed some of its cloud software in bringing Pivotal to life, it's still focusing on selling virtualization software that powers cloud networks. The company is even planning a hosted infrastructure-as-a-service cloud to compete directly against Amazon, which will go by the catchy name of vCloud Hybrid Service. VMware, whose executives have derided Amazon as a mere "company that sells books," is scheduled to launch or at least provide more details on its own public cloud on May 21.

VMware, whose executives have derided Amazon as a mere "company that sells books," is scheduled to launch or at least provide more details on its own public cloud on May 21.

Doesn't Amazon already have a public cloud? In fact, didn't they INVENT the public cloud? I mean, what is AWS if not a public cloud?

Well they are the first to offer it to the public. But Amazon is an IaaS centric cloud. Microsoft was a PaaS centric cloud but is now also offering IaaS. Basically the difference is IaaS is a raw machine, you pick a VM disk for it, setup your web server, setup your own load balancers, etc, and then the application and data. Where as PaaS automates that process further and the only thing you have to setup yourself is the application and data. So in the case a VM goes down while I'm sleeping, PaaS would fix the system and keep my application running, where as IaaS would wait for me to make the next move.

Pardon me if I have a tough time believing that there won't be a VMWare-tax hidden in there somewhere. Don't get me wrong, when virtualization first came to the x86 arena I was one of the first people beating up on it using their betas which I absolutely adored from the security aspect. [I'd been using virtualization on my personal machines since the late '80's and earlier on mainframes.] Great stuff. No. Awesome, god-empowering stuff!

Since then, I've actually been more attracted to (boo, hiss) Microsoft as I don't need a huge budget. KVM is awesome god-empowering stuff as well, flexible as all get-out, just harder to marshall. Point-and-shoot is dumb, but easy! There are all these alternatives out there. So many toys, not enough time to play with them all. Now VMWare really, really wants to insert there layer between my applications and anyone else's virtual hardware. For free? Methinks not. What's the catch. It's in there somewhere.

I'll have to grab a couple of years supply of popcorn. It was all great fun to watch. Now the show is about to get interesting!

Pardon me if I have a tough time believing that there won't be a VMWare-tax hidden in there somewhere. Don't get me wrong, when virtualization first came to the x86 arena I was one of the first people beating up on it using their betas which I absolutely adored from the security aspect. [I'd been using virtualization on my personal machines since the late '80's and earlier on mainframes.] Great stuff. No. Awesome, god-empowering stuff!

I think you are confusing virtualization with virtual machines. we're talking about the latter here.

Pardon me if I have a tough time believing that there won't be a VMWare-tax hidden in there somewhere. Don't get me wrong, when virtualization first came to the x86 arena I was one of the first people beating up on it using their betas which I absolutely adored from the security aspect. [I'd been using virtualization on my personal machines since the late '80's and earlier on mainframes.] Great stuff. No. Awesome, god-empowering stuff!

I think you are confusing virtualization with virtual machines. we're talking about the latter here.

Pardon me if I have a tough time believing that there won't be a VMWare-tax hidden in there somewhere. Don't get me wrong, when virtualization first came to the x86 arena I was one of the first people beating up on it using their betas which I absolutely adored from the security aspect. [I'd been using virtualization on my personal machines since the late '80's and earlier on mainframes.] Great stuff. No. Awesome, god-empowering stuff!

I think you are confusing virtualization with virtual machines. we're talking about the latter here.

Virtualization is the process of creating virtual machines, no?

Virtualization happens anytime the hardware runs more than one program on the processor, or you use virtual memory instead of physical memory addressing. So it's a rather broad field ranging from OS to video games. Where as the virtual machines on offer are physical servers in a multi-tenant environment.